D 16 
.05 
I Copy 1 



Inaugural Lecture 



on 



The Study of History 



DELIVERED ON WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 1906 



CHARLES OMAN, M.A. 

CIJICHBLE PROFESSOR OF MODERN HISTORY 



OXFORD 
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 

1906 



Price One Shilling net 



Inaugural Lecture 



on 



The Study of History 



DELIVERED ON WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 1906 



BY 



CHARLES OMAN, M.A. 

CHICHELE PROFESSOR OF MODERN HISTORY 



• • • 



OXFORD 
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 

1906 



HENRY FROWDE, M.A. 

PUBLISHER TO THE 0NIVERSITY OF OXFORD 

LONDON, EDINBURGH 

NEW YORK AND TORONTO 






INAUGURAL LECTURE ON THE 
STUDY OF HISTORY 

It was with a feeling of deep discouragement that 
I realized on December i8 last, that I was expected 
within six or seven weeks to face my colleagues of the 
Modern History School, and the whole University, with 
an Inaugural Lecture. Such an address ought to be 
a sort of profession of faith, a solemn setting forth of 
the views which the newly-appointed professor holds, 
and the programme which he intends to carry out, so 
far as in him lies, during his tenure of his chair. I have 
heard many inaugural lectures ; most of them were 
interesting, some were pronouncements of much im- 
portance and high literary merit. And now I have to 
come before you, not hke so many of my predecessors 
with all the prestige of a reputation gained outside 
Oxford, not with the glamour of the unknown about 
me, but simply as a veteran college tutor with twenty- 
one years of essays and lectures behind me, to say 
what I must say. How can such a work-a-day being, 
known personally to almost every one here present, the 
most simple and comprehensible of phenomena, hope 
to deliver to you any message that you do not already 
know by heart ? All that I can set forth is the impres- 
sion which twenty-one years of practical teaching, 
interspersed with such research as my leisure would 
allow, has left upon my mind. I have no dreams of 
revolutionizing the University ; I have no ' divine dis- 



4 INAUGURAL LECTURE ON THE 

content ' about me. I have always loved my work, and 
I think that our present history curriculum, despite 
certain faults, is on the whole a very admirable com- 
promise between the practical and the ideal. If you 
expect me to advocate the abolition of our examinations 
and classes, or the substitution of some systems of 
seminars for the tutor's weekly essay, or the conversion 
of our Modern History School into a technical machine 
for training historians, I fear that you will be dis- 
appointed. Perhaps my thrice seven years in harness 
have stereotyped my views and made me short-sighted 
in my outlook on history at large ; perhaps— and this 
I naturally prefer to believe myself, for man is a hopeful 
if a fallible being— they have given me some practical 
lessons, which not every history professor has had the 
chance of learning. It is for you to judge. I can but 
give my humble opinion for what it is worth, on what 
I think that history is, and how I think it can best 
be taught. The theme, you may say, is trite— we have 
heard and read far too much about it already. Can 
I say anything that has not been put in a much better 
shape by some earlier venter of such harangues? 
Remember the wisdom of Bishop Stubbs's Inaugural 
of 1868, the passion of Freeman's declamation, the 
literary polish that Froude put into his half-ironical 
apology for himself and his works, the sober eloquence 
with which the present Regius Professor set forth his 
plea for the ' historical teaching of history '. What can 
I give that is worthy to follow on such a series of 
addresses? Nothing; I have but to deliver the com- 
ments of a practical teacher on what he has seen and 
what he has read during eighty continuous terms of 
residence in this University. 

But to proceed. What have been the messages of the 



STUDY OF HISTORY 5 

history professors whom I personally remember ? The 
chair which I myself have the honour to hold has but 
a short record. This is, I believe, the first inaugural 
lecture by a Chichele Professor of Modern History that 
any member of this University has ever attended. 
When the professorship was founded in 1862, and my 
dear old predecessor Montagu Burrows was chosen 
as its first occupant, the custom of delivering such 
harangues does not seem to have been yet fully es- 
tablished. At any rate, I can find no trace either in 
the oral tradition of the College, or in written archives — 
there was no University Gazette till 1870 — that he 
thought it necessary to open his first professorial term 
in such a fashion. If he did set forth his views on 
history, and the way in which it should be taught^ 
in any formal address, I make no doubt that it was 
as sensible and patriotic as was every other speech 
of his to which I listened, during the twenty-two years 
that we were members of All Souls College together. 
He was a man who always strove to do his duty, and 
we may take it that he laid down for himself in 1862 
precisely the course that he actually carried out for the 
forty-three years of sohd and unassuming work that 
followed his election to the chair. In his early days he 
was a popular lecturer — in his later time audiences had 
drifted away and historical teaching had taken to 
developments that were unfamiliar to him. But to 
the last his terminal lectures were carefully prepared 
and duly delivered : he always did his best to bring 
them up to the level of the last modern discoveries : he 
frequently composed an entirely new course : for he 
was not one of those professors who are contented 
to discharge statutory obligations by the constant re- 
petition of a limited number of familiar exercises, in the 



6 INAUGURAL LECTURE ON- THE 

style of the barrel-organ. Nor did he ever— Hke some 
other distinguished professors that I remember — 
announce series of lectures on out-of-the-way subjects 
and at inconvenient hours, to which nobody came, and 
nobody was intended to come. Many of those who 
were wont to speak over-lightly of him might have 
learned a lesson from his conscientious discharge of 
his duties according to his lights, under circumstances 
which in his later years were enough to dishearten 
a much younger man. Many forgot his very considerable 
literary output : he had published more than a dozen 
books, small and great, of which several — for example 
his Life of Lord Hawke — have remained the standard 
authorities on the subjects with which they deal unto 
this day. Oxford might be considered happy if all her 
professors attained to his standard of duty and his level 
of performance. 

If Montagu Burrows never delivered an inaugural ad- 
dress, the custom which made such lectures permissible, 
and then practically obligatory, came in not many years 
after his preferment to theChichele chair. I have read that 
which Dr. Stubbs delivered in 1867, and I have heard with 
my own ears those of his four successors. Burrows, you 
will note, in his forty-three years of office, saw no less 
than six Regius professors in occupation of the other 
historical chair which this University maintains, and all 
six of them men of mark. Dr. Stubbs's inaugural lecture 
started with a eulogy on King George I — rather an 
unpromising subject for panegyric, though that prosaic 
monarch deserved a moment's praise as the founder of 
the Regius chair. But the main thesis of his address 
was the praise of history for its own sake : it is curious 
to note that in 1867 it would seem to have been neces- 
sary to defend the study as a thing on its trial as an 



STUDY OF HISTORY 7 

educational training, and still derided as such by some 
of the academic thinkers of that generation. We are 
far from the time when Dr. Stubbs had to declare that 
' History is not well used : it is taught as a task for 
children, it is valued only as an instrument to strengthen 
the memory : it is undervalued in its true character of 
mental training : it is learned to qualify men to make 
effective speeches to ignorant hearers, and to indite 
brilliant articles for people who only read periodicals : 
it has been begun from the base of ecclesiastical or 
political partizanship : it is made the embellishment for 
wordy eloquence, a source of subjects for pictorial talent 
that evolves grouping, features, and circumstances from 
its own consciousness, and then goes to its dictionary 
to look out names and dates for its figures : it is written 
for readers already known, courted, and pandered to. 
What wonder if there are few who love it for its own 
sake, when there are so few who know it as it is! ' In 
1867 that great man thought it necessary to defend 
history from the charge of being the mere handmaid of 
political or ecclesiastical controversy, to declare that it 
should be studied as an end in itself with no ulterior 
motives. How he would have been surprised to find 
that, less than forty years later, the apologetic tone of 
historians would be so much a thing of the past that a 
Cambridge Regius professor could declare that history, 
considered as history, has no more to do with morals 
than it has to do with literature, and seem almost to 
deprecate any attempt either to strive to make it read- 
able, or to draw any moral deductions from its study. 
Stubbs believed, and most of us (I think) still beheve 
to-day, that the science which we love is not merely 
concerned with the stringing together of facts in theii* 
^orrect order and the reconstitution of annals, but with 



8 INAUGURAL LECTURE ON THE 

something more. We must draw the moral, whether 
we will or no : conscious that much nonsense has been 
talked under the name of ' the philosophy of history *, 
that nothing is so cheap and so easy as to knock together 
ingenious theories from insufficient data, we yet hold 
that history has its lessons, and that they can be dis- 
covered and taught. * The experience of the past,* as 
Stubbs wrote, * can be carried into the present : study 
gives us maxims as well as dry facts.' The teacher who 
contents himself with arraying the facts in due order 
has only accomplished half his task. He must take the 
risk and endeavour to deduce the inner meaning of the 
annals that he has set forth, content to err if err he 
must. The fear of being detected in a mistaken con- 
clusion, which keeps some men from drawing any 
conclusions at all, is a craven fear. What matter if 
we are proved wrong, provided that truth is advanced ? 
All men are liable to error : true greatness of spirit is 
shown not by the man who assumes the pose of infalli- 
bility, but by him who joyfully accepts correction, and 
turns it to immediate account. 

I did not hear Dr. Stubbs's Inaugural Lecture — being 
then a small schoolboy— but I did hear that of his 
successor Freeman, and those of the three professors 
who followed Freeman in the Regius chair. I retain 
a very clear remembrance of each of them, and have 
refreshed my recollections by looking up the records 
of them in contemporary periodicals. Freeman's address 
in October, 1884, was in the main an impassioned 
harangue in praise of what he called the ' Unity of 
History'. His thesis was that it is useless to draw a 
line at the year 476 a. d., and to call what goes before 
' Ancient ' and what comes after ' Modern ' : that every 
one who desires to study history must range freely 



STUDY OF HISTORY 9 

over the whole period from the Call of Abraham or the 
Dorian Migration to the Russo-Turkish war, which was 
(when he spoke) the last landmark in European annals. 
The theme was inspiring ; the general truth of the fact 
that it is absurd to shut up history with water-tight 
compartments is undeniable. But the application of it 
to the practical needs of the University was the difficult 
point. Freeman tried to illustrate it by delivering a 
series of lectures on the history of Sicily, which was to 
range from the earliest Greek and Carthaginian settle- 
ment of the island past the Punic Wars, the Goths and 
Vandals and Moors, down to the days of the Norman 
Roger and Frederic of Hohenstaufen. But the lectures 
were never completed, because no continuous audience 
could be found to attend them. Nor can I blame the 
University for not being able to provide hearers for 
a great historian lecturing on a great subject. It is a 
melancholy fact that the days are past in which it was 
possible for any one — graduate or undergraduate — to 
aim at being encyclopaedic. The bulk of knowledge 
to be assimilated, of books to be read, has grown so 
great that no wise man proposes to himself, even in his 
wildest dreams, to acquire more than a sound working 
knowledge of general history. That proper basis of 
assimilated facts he must possess, or he will risk building 
his specialized work without a foundation. But the 
main interest of the student must be confined within 
some narrower and less ambitious sphere, and to expect 
him to master over two thousand years of the history 
of Sicily in anything but the main outlines was hopeless. 
Freeman did not propose to give a rapid sketch of the 
annals of the island, but to linger over them lovingly 
for some four or five terms— now commenting on the 
text of Thucydides or of Diodorus, anon on that of 



lo INAUGURAL LECTURE ON THE 

Geoffrey Malaterra. But I think that no one followed 
the whole of the various sections of this vast whole, and 
I know well how few were those who attended the later 
course, and listened to the details of the expulsion of 
the Moor, and the building up of the Norman realm. 
Unfortunately those who were interested in Timoleon 
and Agathocles could not be induced to follow the 
exploits of Maniakes or Roger, and vice versa. To 
those who were ready to specialize in the one period, 
the other period was only a small corner of that vast 
bulk of universal history which cannot be studied in 
a minute fashion. We all beheve, in short, in the unity 
of history, but we know to our sorrow that it is not 
possible to master all parts of it with the same thorough- 
ness. Freeman used to ascribe the indifference of the 
members of the University to his lectures on Gregory 
of Tours or Geoffrey Malaterra to the Examination 
system, his pet aversion : he thought that if graduates 
and undergraduates had not been pinned down to 
Period IV or Period VI, or the textual knowledge of 
the Charters of Stubbs, and all our other technicalities 
of the Schools, they would have been thronging to his 
lectures on the Frank or the Norman. I fancy that he 
erred — the real rock in the way was the growmg sense 
of the vastness of history and the necessity for special- 
ization. How many men in a hundred, if each were 
allowed to choose his own course and read what he 
pleased, would pitch on the particular epoch that 
happened to be that which most interested the professor 
of the day ? A small proportion at the best, and therein 
lies the whole difficulty of reconciling certain views of 
the professorial office with the practical facts of the 
study of history by the average man. 

Nothing could contrast more curiously with Freeman's 



STUDY OF HISTORY ii 

Inaugural of 1884 than Froude's Inaugural of 1892. 
The one was the sermon of a prophet who had his 
message to deliver, who was righteously indignant with 
a generation which, as he thought, refused to make all 
history its province, and was in bondage to the curri- 
culum of the schools. Froude's lecture, on the other 
hand, was not couched in such terms of earnest 
denunciation : it was paradoxical, witty, full of persiflage 
and half-ironical apologetics. ' How do I come to be 
here, Regius Professor of the University of Oxford?' 
he asked, and then answered, with a smile, ' I was 
tempted — and I fell.' But putting aside his very clever 
and rather touching personal explanation of his attitude 
to Oxford and Oxford's attitude to him, the main thesis 
of Froude's lecture was a defence of the personal and 
dramatic treatment of history. He fully appreciated all 
that had been said or written against his methods and 
his manner, and set himself cheerfully to defend them. 
I was carried away at the moment by his eloquent plea 
in favour of the view that history must be written as 
literature, that it is the historian's duty to present his 
work in a shape that will be clearly comprehensible to 
as many readers as possible, that dull, pedantic, over- 
technical diction is an absolute crime, since by it 
possible converts to the cause of history may be turned 
back and estranged. To Froude's other view, that the 
influence of the personality of the historian cannot 
possibly be eliminated, that he must state the case as 
it appears to him, not as it might appear to some 
other-self destitute of convictions and prejudices, I 
found myself giving a logical negative, but a practical 
approval. Logically no doubt one ought to agree with 
Lord Acton and Dr. Bury, and to conceive of the 
historian as a passionless creature set only on chroni- 



12 INAUGURAL LECTURE ON THE 

cling the facts as they occurred. You will remember 
how Lord Acton put his view in the introductory 
Epistle to the great 'Cambridge Modern History* — 
' Contributors must understand/ he wrote, * that nobody 
must be able to tell, without examining the list of 
authors, where the bishop of Oxford laid down the 
pen, and whether it was Fairbairn or Gasquet, Lieber- 
mann or Harrison who took it up. . . . Our account of 
Waterloo must be one that satisfies French and English, 
German and Dutchman alike.' I may incidentally 
remark that the admirable ' Cambridge History ' has not 
actually been written in any such fashion. Even were 
the authors* names deleted, it would require no great 
power of textual criticism to find out where Dr. Fair" 
bairn 'took up the pen*. The chapter on Waterloo 
chanced to fall to my own care : I fear that I cannot 
conscientiously declare that it would be as satisfactory 
to the Dutchman as to the Frenchman — though I did 
my best according to my lights to arrive at the exact 
truth. In sober fact it is impossible to write history 
that every man, whatever his race, creed, or politics, 
can accept — unless indeed we are dealing with ages and 
problems so remote from our own that the personal 
element does not appear. Conceivably it may be 
possible to talk of Khammurabi or Rameses or some 
statesman of China of the seventh century b.c. without 
offending any man. It is not possible to do so with 
Pericles or Caesar — much less with Hildebrand or 
Calvin, Napoleon or Bismarck. The historian whose 
verdict on any one of those crucial personages is to be 
equally satisfactory to everybody, must perform a sort 
of tour de force of compromise and hedging, or confine 
himself to the bald statement of facts accomplished. 
The moment that he dares to draw a deduction or point 



STUDY OF HISTORY 13 

a moral, the personal element inevitably makes itself 
felt. Imagine an appreciation of Bismarck that equally 
pleased a patriotic Frenchman and a patriotic German ! 

Therefore I am practically driven to concede to 
Froude that history must be subjective. No great 
book ever has been or ever will be written by a 
historian who suppressed self as he wrote each word : 
what such a book may conceivably gain in accuracy 
it loses in spontaneity and conviction. The passionless 
scientist chronicling the antics of puppets with whom he 
feels no sympathy, for whom he has no moral like or 
dislike, does not tend to produce a readable literary 
output. I can safely leave the view of those who hold 
that history has nothing to do with literature — any more 
than it has anything to do with morals — and the view 
advocated by Froude to fight out their duel in the 
public arena, little doubting which will be the winner. 

And now for a word on the third of the inaugural 
lectures of history professors that I have listened to. 
York Powell was the friend of all of us : most of us also 
owe him a kindly memory for help given and useful 
hints received. All remember the high hopes which 
we entertained when he was appointed to the Regius 
Chair. His Inaugural was characteristic — a short eulogy 
of Freeman and Stubbs— a bare mention of Froude — an 
earnest plea for the starting in England of something 
like the Paris Ecole des Chartes — and then a pause and 
a gap and nothing more. The address was a sym- 
pathetic and suggestive torso, lasting less than half an 
hour. York Powell, with all his vast knowledge and his 
ready, many-sided brain, was always more effective 
in what he suggested than in what he accomplished. 
So far as I could follow the thesis that he wished to 
develop in his address, it was that the study of history 



14 INAUGURAL LECTURE ON THE 

in this country was handicapped by a want of machinery 
for the facihtation of research — places where the student 
can be taught the elements of palaeography and diplo- 
matics, where he can have his run among manuscripts 
and learn their tricks and habits under skilled super- 
vision, where he can lay his hand readily on scientific 
bibliographies. Unlike most of the suggestions made 
in inaugural lectures, this plea had some effect— but 
only in London. In Oxford, where it might have been 
expected to have led to some definite and immediate 
effort, nothing was done : the Common Fund prefers to 
endow readerships for subjects in which it is perfectly 
certain that no large class of learners can ever be got 
together — such as Egyptology— and leaves us with our 
admirable teachers in palaeography and diplomatic 
stinted to a miserable ;^5o or ;^8o and lecturing for only 
a few weeks in the year. 

The thesis of York Powell's inaugural lecture leads 
us on directly to that of the present occupant of the 
Regius chair — my good friend Professor Firth — which 
most of those present to-day heard delivered some 
eighteen months ago. The two addresses are linked 
together by the fact that both of them are pleas for the 
researcher — York Powell wished to have him equipped 
with the necessary machinery for starting on his work. 
Professor Firth wants to have him 'taught history 
historically ', to use the phrase that stands at the head 
of the printed form of his lecture. Every one must 
agree with such an aspiration — the very idea of a his- 
torian taught unhistorically seems to carry its own 
refutation on its face. Clearly we all are and must be 
at one on this point — if we understand the same thing by 
the same phrase. But I fancy that the exact shade of 
meaning in Professor Firth's mind when he uses these 



STUDY OF HISTORY 15 

words is what he expands (in another page) into * a 
training in the methods of investigation, in the use of 
original authorities, and in those auxiHary sciences 
which the Germans call Hilfswissenschaften. When we 
have narrowed down the meaning of the ' historical 
teaching of history' to this sense, I feel inclined to 
observe that to a certain extent we are so teaching 
history already, and that where we clearly are not, there 
is much to be said for the less ambitious programme 
that is at present followed. In short we agree on many 
things, but differ on the problem how far the Modern 
History School should be technical, how far general 
and merely educational in its scope. At the bottom any 
divergence that there may be between us comes from 
a slightly varied point of view on that old problem of 
the 'Hberal education', what it is, and what it is not, 
which has already been (perhaps) debated too much in 
academic circles. It may be that I am prejudiced from 
having taken the old Literae Humaniores School before 
I turned my hand to history. I fear that I am still 
more prejudiced by having been engaged for more than 
twenty years in conducting all sorts and conditions ot 
men up to, and through, the portals of the Examination 
Schools. Five years spent as a deputy professor have 
not eradicated the old tutorial virus from my system. 
It is from the standing-point of the college teacher, 
released at last from his dumbness and permitted for the 
first time to speak ex cathedra, that I state my conclusion. 
It is many years since an inaugural lecture was de- 
livered to this University by a history professor who 
came to his post straight from bearing the burden and 
heat of the day as an ordinary college tutor. Dr. Stubbs 
reached the Regius Professorship from the leisure of 
a country vicarage ; Freeman and Froude had spent the, 



i6 INAUGURAL LECTURE ON THE 

best part of their lives in the happy condition of the 
literary historian who works untrammelled by terms that 
have to be kept, essays that have to be heard, and 
lectures that have to be delivered in formal and regular 
sequence. Our last Regius professor but one, as all 
who knew him and loved him will confess, was not an 
ordinary college tutor though he held a tutorial post. 
Our present Regius professor, to whose inaugural 
lecture we listened with such interest only last year, 
shared with Freeman and Froude the privilege of work- 
ing when and how he pleased, save for the short time 
during which he took the history work of a college 
where history men were few and far between. All of 
the five whom I have named, in short, represented the 
class of the researcher rather than that of the pro- 
fessional University teacher. Some of them almost 
gloried in the fact that they knew nothing of, and cared 
little for, the way in which the average man here was 
receiving his education. I heard with my own ears 
Professor Freeman make the astounding statement 
that ' in the art of preparing — I will not use the ugly 
word cramming — an undergraduate for his class, the 
last bachelor who has just won his own class is 
necessarily more skilful than I '. At that moment (1884) 
I was myself that * last bachelor ', and as such could best 
fathom the strange misconception of our system which 
such a statement presupposed. Froude's Inaugural, 
though it spoke of Oxford history in vaguely laudatory 
terms, implied an almost equally complete misunder- 
standing of what the work of the History School really 
was. He advocated, as a happy suggestion, the use of 
plenty of early constitutional documents as a base for 
the study of English History — in apparent ignorance of 
jthe fact that Stubbs's Charters was already a sort of 



STUDY OF HISTORY 17 

Bible for the undergraduate, and that a textual know- 
ledge of it was the one thing on which some of our 
local teachers were laying what I privately considered 
almost too great a stress. A little while after giving his 
Inaugural he wrote to a friend, * The teaching business 
at Oxford, which goes on at high pressure, is in itself 
utterly absurd/ Professor Firth has taught and ex- 
amined for the School himself, so knows a great deal 
more about it than Froude or Freeman, but I think he is 
rather hard upon it when he says that ' he must complain 
that it does extremely little for the exceptional man who 
wishes to study history for its own sake '. I was myself 
one of those unfortunate exceptionals, and know per- 
fectly well that it did a good deal for me — though I had 
only a scant ten months to read for it. 

So, begging for the indulgence of an audience which 
has perhaps come to hear of higher matters, I must 
state my humble conviction that our present system, 
as it works out in the teaching of the average college 
tutor and the examinations by the University which 
follow, has done admirably in the past and is still 
vigorous and successful. I do not maintain that the 
curriculum could not be improved. I do not pretend 
to say that there have not been in my memory in- 
sufficiently equipped tutors, and dull tutors, and (what 
is more frequent) tutors of high gifts, who were yet 
utterly unable to inspire or interest even the most 
conscientious pupil. The worst teacher without excep- 
tion that I ever knew was a man who had obtained the 
highest possible University distinctions, and had also 
done meritorious work in research. He did not teach 
in Oxford, so no one need try to identify him. But 
I am thinking of the system as worked by its best 
exponents, not its less satisfactory ones. And, so 



i8 INAUGURAL LECTURE ON THE 

thinking I am indignant at all the cheap satire levelled 
against the college tutorial system, the curriculum of 
the Schools, the examinations and their results, which 
forms the staple of the irresponsible criticisms of the 
daily, weekly, or monthly press, of the pamphlets of 
the man with a grievance, and of the harangues 
delivered when educationalists (horrid word !) assemble 
in conclave. 

The first problem that must be faced is that this 
University is a place of Education as well as a place of 
Research. It is sometimes difficult to correlate its two 
functions : it often seems difficult to determine how far 
they can or ought to be discharged by the same body of 
workers. But, whatever may be our views on this point, 
there remains the obvious fact that we are confronted 
by a large body of young men who have to be educated, 
and that the larger proportion of them are intended for 
careers for which no technical Schools-curriculum 
exists. For this let us be thankful ; I shudder to think 
that there are fanatics who would be prepared to draw 
up the regulations for a special education for any line 
of Hfe — journalism, the Stock Exchange, politics. Charity 
Organization, or the life of the country gentleman. But 
this madness is still far off— practically our problem 
is to deal with some 150 or 200 undergraduates destined 
for the most various occupations in after-life, who unite 
in thinking that the Modern History School suits them 
better than any other of the avenues to a degree which 
the University at present offers. Of this body a very 
small proportion are destined in the end to take up the 
burden of original research. I agree with Professor 
Firth — so doubtless does every one here present — in 
regretting that the percentage ts so small; but it can 
never be much larger — unless indeed some strange 



STUDY OF HISTORY 19 

power should ever succeed in turning our old Modern 
History Course into a technical school for historians — 
technical in the sense that the education here in Medicine 
or Forestry is technical. I should myself — as I have 
said before— deplore any such transformation, holding 
as I do that the School is discharging a more generally 
useful function as it stands at present, than it would 
if it were equipped with a severely specialistic curri- 
culum, intended only for those who were destined for the 
career of researchers in or teachers of history. Clearly 
a School reconstructed on such lines would cease to 
attract some four-fifths of those who at present enter 
for it. It would be a wholly different affair. 

Now there are some few of these young gentlemen 
whom we have at present to teach, whom I should 
be quite contented to evict ; they read Modern History 
not because they have any vocation for its study, or 
any special interest in it, but simply and solely because 
their college compels them to offer some Honour School, 
and they hope to find this one rather less rebarbative 
than Law or Mathematics, Theology or Physical Science. 
These men, Passmen ^wei. Honour-men by external 
compulsion, are a nuisance to their tutors ; it is heart- 
breaking to harangue them for forty minutes as they 
loll listless, after delivering their perfunctory weekly 
essay. They are a nuisance to the examiner, who sits 
doubting wearily whether he shall give them a * group ' 
or two, or simply relegate them to the limbo of non 
satis. They are ultimately a nuisance to the college 
which has unwisely forced them to take honours, since 
they are thrown back upon it in October, to take some 
sort of a pass— to the complete upsetting of tutorial 
arrangements. 

But setting aside the 30 or 40 men a year who ought 

B 2 



20 INAUGURAL LECTURE ON THE 

not to have appeared in the Modern History School at 
all, we have a remainder of from 140 to 160 under- 
graduates, of whom only some ten or a dozen have any 
intention either of taking up historical teaching or of 
engaging in original research. The remainder are 
destined to the most various careers : some will become 
members of Parliament or diplomatists, many will be 
civil servants, some will take Holy Orders, others will be 
journalists, hterary men, business men, barristers, 
schoolmasters, and what not. To all such a sound 
general knowledge of history — with the elements of 
economic history, political science, political geography, 
constitutional history — will be invaluable. Palaeography, 
the so-called ' study of methods of investigation ', and all 
the Hilfswissenschaften will be of comparatively little use. 
And — for here comes the difficulty — if the technical 
subjects are introduced, it can only be at the cost of 
teaching less of the general subjects. For the student's 
time during the two years that he has to devote to 
the Modern History School is quite sufficiently occupied 
by the present curriculum. New matter can only 
be introduced by evicting some of the old matter, or 
teaching it in a less thorough and solid fashion. Is 
there any section of the present prescribed work which 
we should like to cut down to any appreciable extent ? 
I mean to cut down to such an extent that the time 
saved on it would be sufficient to allow of the intro- 
duction of several new elements — such as palaeography — 
into the curriculum. Personally I might be desirous 
of paying a little less attention to early constitutional 
antiquities than is done at present. But I must confess 
that if I was permitted to economize on that point, 
it would only be with the desire of increasing the 
quantity of foreign history required. The present 



STUDY OF HISTORY 21 

periods seem to me too short, and the men should 
be compelled to read them not in English manuals but 
in the great foreign historians. To my poor apprehen- 
sion the real blot on the School is not the one that has 
been alleged, but the want of any provision that the 
student shall have some grip of several foreign languages. 
At present Latin is the only tongue with which he is 
compelled to show some acquaintance. Scores of men 
every year escape any touch with French, German, 
or Italian by offering those two special subjects— India 
and the Great Rebellion— where all the prescribed books 
are in English. And even of Latin the amount required 
is so small that a man may obtain a first class without 
being able to translate a simple Classical author with 
reasonable accuracy. I speak of this from personal 
experience. Nothing, therefore, can be more cheering 
than the news that the Hebdomadal Council is just about 
to bring forward a statute enabling us to make a know- 
ledge of modern languages compulsory on all our 
candidates. 

But I must not wander from the point which I am 
now engaged in urging. It seems to me that we must 
frankly recognize that the Modern History curriculum 
must be drawn up rather with an eye to the vast 
majority of men who seek in it a general liberal educa- 
tion, than to the small minority to whom a technical 
training in historiography might conceivably be more 
profitable. And further, I think that even for this 
minority the present School is an excellent base for 
their later studies, and a base with which they cannot 
dispense. For of all things the most necessary for the 
researcher is a very broad knowledge of the general 
trend of history far outside the Hmits of his special 
period. Unless he has this, he risks making the 



22 INAUGURAL LECTURE ON THE 

wildest and most absurd errors the moment that he 
tries to draw a comparison between epoch and epoch, 
or to illustrate his thesis by parallels from another age 
or another country. The scientifically trained con- 
tinental historian is as liable to this as the most self- 
taught English local antiquary. May I give an 
illustration ? Seignebos's Europe Contemporaine is 
an oft-quoted authority, yet drawing a moral from 
Enghsh Politics and mentioning the Adullamites of 1866, 
he (for want of a little Scripture history) solemnly 
adds, 'Adullamites, allusion Biblique, assassins — parce 
qu'Adullam a voulu tuer David.' And did not the almost 
infallible Mommsen, trespassing, for once in a way, into 
ground where he was insufficiently informed, note in 
one of his chapters on the Roman Empire that the 
Welsh tongue is to-day spoken in Cumberland and 
Westmoreland ? 

If such men can write such strange errors, what are 
we to expect from the Oxford researcher, if we let him 
off any appreciable portion of his study of the general 
foundations of history, in order that he may substitute 
technical and specialistic knowledge of the epoch in 
which he is interested ? I would have no man per- 
mitted to undertake any original work until he has 
acquired a very broad as well as a very sound know- 
ledge of the general outlines of history, and this is what 
I maintain that our present Modern History School — 
with all its defects — does on the whole give us. But 
— say some — granted that the School may put those 
who study it honestly in possession of a vast mass of 
facts, it yet does not furnish them with method, with 
the art of turning all those facts to logical account. 
Here I venture to differ : there are parts of the curri- 
culum which seem to me to be precisely calculated 



STUDY OF HISTORY 23 

to have the desired effect on all the better minds that 
are brought into contact with them. If a man cannot 
pick up the art of weighing and comparing facts and 
theories from studying his Aristotle and his Maine, his 
Hobbes, his Maitland and his Stubbs, he will not pick 
it up from any lectures on method. If he can read all 
the prescribed books for his special subject without 
learning how to compare sources and evaluate their 
worth ; if he can peruse Clarendon and Ludlow, Baillie 
and Cromwell's Speeches; or again, if he can read 
James Mill with the dispatches of Warren Hastings 
and Wellesley, or Boha-ed-din alongside of the Itiner- 
arium Ricardi, without learning automatically the 
elements of historical criticism— then he is not a person 
about whom we need bother our heads at all. He 
will never make a historian, though you drive ' method ' 
into him with a hammer. 

In short, the true historian— and here lies the gist 
of my creed— is born and not made. If he has the 
root of the matter in him, he gets precisely such 
a preliminary education from his schools as will enable 
him to work for himself when his schools are over. Of 
course if his tastes are mediaeval he will have to learn 
palaeography afterwards; but this is a small matter. 
Do we not possess an admirable teacher in that subject, 
though we pay him too little, and do not even enable 
him to lecture all the year round ? But as to the rest, 
it seems to me that the one counsel that can be given 
to the man who has achieved his first class for the 
Schools and then wishes to set sail into the ocean 
of Research, is simply to work— and work— and work 
again. He will think many hours wasted— they are 
not really so: a negative result is often as valuable 
as (though less exciting than) a positive one. In the 



24 INAUGURAL LECTURE ON THE 

search, too, for what you do not find, you will often 
come upon material which will be invaluable to you 
in some later exploration ten years hence. Every 
queer corner explored, every abandoned shaft sunk 
into some unfruitful stratum, has really been part 
of our training. It is only what we have found for 
ourselves that really lives for us: second-hand know- 
ledge is useful for the general enquirer, for the ' man in 
the Schools '—it can be taught and well taught. First- 
hand knowledge is unteachable— it must be learnt for 
oneself— not from the lecture of the man who has ' been 
there before'. I hate to hear the historical beginner i 
whining that he cannot go out into the world of history 
and find everything already ticketed and docketed and 
done up into neat parcels, ready for his immediate use. 
His moan is merely like that of the stupid undergraduate 
who comes back to you to complain that he can find 
nowhere in print the comparison between the strategy 
of Napoleon Bonaparte and of Frederic the Great which 
you have set him for an essay. If history could be 
automatically constructed, by putting before the student 
perfect bibliographies, from which he could find every 
possible fact that he could require, it would be (to my 
mind) a dreary business. Fortunately this danger is 
solving itself— bibliographies on some subjects have 
grown so enormous that they have become a hindrance 
rather than a help : what good is it to have 700 titles 
of monographs, of all varieties of intrinsic value and 
accessibihty, flung in your face ? 

In short, it seems to me that zeal, insatiable curiosity, 
a ready mind to shape hypotheses, a sound judgement to 
test them, above all a dogged determination to work at 
all times and in all places, are the real requisites of the 
historian rather than any array of technical training. 



STUDY OF HISTORY 25 

The very best of our own English work has always 
been done in that fashion, and I think that it will con- 
tinue so to be done. The sanity and energy and 
ingenuity of the researcher is the main thing that 
matters. If he is worth his salt, he will teach himself 
* method' in a very short time. Nothing astonishes me 
more than the way in which the real born historian 
learns to get to the heart of a matter within a year or 
so of starting work— and as to the man who is not 
born to the trade, it is .mistaken kindness to encourage 
him to turn to a career for which he is not mentally 
equipped. 

But it being granted that we have obtained the right 
man, with the requisite energy, zeal, and preliminary 
education, there are still two notes of caution which 
have to be struck if we are to get really fruitful work 
out of him. The one is obvious, the other much less 
so. The first is that the would-be historian must avoid 
vague sporadic and ill-defined aims, which enable him 
to wander over vast and miscellaneous fields of research, 
absorbing masses of material of such heterogeneous 
kinds that they never get digested, and never arrive at 
the dignity of print. If any work is ever really wasted 
in the world, it is that of the man who makes himself 
a sort of walking encyclopaedia, and then dies without 
having produced a single book. His knowledge perishes 
with him, and the facts which he has collected have to 
be reconquered by some successor, because he has 
never deigned to commit them to paper. Every one 
of us has known such men — but perhaps I may be 
permitted to speak for a moment of the king of them 
all. I name him with infinite respect : he was in some 
ways a great man, and he might have been a great 
historian. He started to read history early, he was 



26 INAUGURAL LECTURE ON THE 

granted a long life, he had ample leisure, he was able 
to collect such a library of its kind as England had 
never before seen. And he died leaving as his life's 
achievement a lecture or two, and a number of reviews 
and short papers scattered about in the back numbers 
of more or less unobtainable periodicals, together with a 
scheme for a modern history which (though excellent in 
itself) has certainly not been carried out on the lines 
which he laid down. This heart-breaking paucity of 
results from a man qualified to do great things seems 
to me to have proceeded mainly from the cardinal 
defect of the want of a definite clear-cut thesis. Lord 
Acton had a great book hovering before his mind : what 
it was I have never made out : his literary executor, 
Mr. John Morley, once told me that he fancied that its 
subject was the Growth of the Modern Idea of Liberty : 
but two or three alternative and equally vast titles 
have been suggested. Whatever it was, its compilation 
necessitated the accumulation of such a mass of detailed 
material that no single human brain could possibly deal 
with it. I went down into Shropshire to look at that 
famous library before it was removed to Cambridge: 
never was there such a pathetic sight of wasted labour. 
The owner had read it all : there were shelves on shelves 
on every conceivable subject — Renaissance sorcery — 
the Fueros of Aragon — Scholastic Philosophy — the 
growth of the French Navy — American exploration — 
Church Councils — and many books were full of hundreds 
of cross-references in pencil, noting passages as bearing 
on some particular development or evolution in modern 
life or thought. There were pigeon-holed cabinets with 
literally thousands of compartments, into each of which 
were sorted scores of little white papers with references 
to some particular topic, so drawn up (as far as I could 



STUDY OF HISTORY 27 

judge) that no one but the compiler could easily make 
out the drift of the section. Arranged in the middle 
of the long two-storied room was a sort of altar or 
column composed entirely of unopened parcels of new 
books from continental publishers. They were appa- 
rently coming in at the rate often or fifteen books a week, 
and the owner had evidently tried to keep pace with the 
accumulation — to digest and annotate them all, and 
work them into his vast thesis — whatever it was. For 
years apparently he must have been engaged on this 
Sisyphean task. Over all these were brown holland 
sheets, a thick coating of dust, the motes dancing in the 
pale September sun, a faint aroma of mustiness proceed- 
ing from thousands of seventeenth and eighteenth cen- 
tury leather bindings in a room that had been locked up 
since its owner's death. I never saw any sight which so 
much impressed on me the vanity of human life. 
A quarter of the work that had been spent on making 
those annotations and filling those pigeon-holes would 
have produced twenty volumes of good history — perhaps 
an epoch-making book that might have lived for centuries. 
But all the labour had been wasted — save so- far as the 
actual accumulation of the dead books was a permanent 
gain to Cambridge — because the accumulator had too 
vague and too broad an aim. It is better to have pro- 
duced one solid monograph on the minutest point — 
better to have edited a single pipe-roll or annotated 
a single short chronicle — than to have accumulated 
for forty years unwritten learning that goes down to the 
grave and is lost. And I said to myself^Learn to 
be definite at all costs ; be limited, if it is necessary, 
stick to a single century if it must be so, or to a single 
reign, but write something — knowledge not committed 
to paper is knowledge lost. 



28 INAUGURAL LECTURE ON THE 

This moral may seem to some of you to be a mere 
* occasional glimpse of the obvious ', such as may occur 
to the meanest mind. Not so, I think, the second 
caution that I would give to all who intend to make 
history the mistress of their life. It is this, that ' the 
best', the ideal, the vision of the epoch-making and 
infaUible magnum opus which hovers before the mind 
of many a would-be writer, is the enemy of ' the good ', 
of the useful and worthy, but comparatively unambitious, 
book that he is really competent to write. Do not 
be led away by megalomania : do not think that you can 
possibly write a book without mistakes : the man who 
imagines that he can do so will probably never write 
a book at all. The great Turenne once remarked that 
' the general who has made no errors in strategy must 
have commanded in uncommonly few campaigns ', and 
hinted that he did not believe that general to exist. It 
is the same with the writer of history : he must make 
up his mind that, however hard he may strive for 
absolute accuracy, it is certain that there will be errors 
of detail somewhere — perhaps errors of more than detail. 
But he should not for that reason shrink back from 
production; I have known books hung up for years 
because the author had not the heart to confess himself 
fallible. Nothing is a more subtle and deadly enemy of 
the writing of a good book than a great reputation already 
won without any literary output. The man who has 
achieved such a reputation dreads committing himself to 
print, from an exaggerated fear of being detected in 
error : such a feeling often grows into actual monomania, 
and one who could have done good work dies bookless, 
because he hated the idea of seeing his limitations 
revealed to the world by some captious critic. 

This is not the spirit in which the true historian must 



STUDY OF HISTORY 29 

approach his life's work ; he must realize that the 
competent labourer who refuses his co-operation in the 
great task of reaping the harvest of the' past — the harvest 
that is so great while the labourers are still so few — is 
sinning against the light. We stand at present in 
a crisis when the raw material has accumulated in such 
masses that there is a most pressing want of hands to 
sort and arrange it. To stand by idle, because you feel 
that some of your work may prove of no more than 
temporary worth, because your amour propre revolts 
against the notion that you may be building a scaffolding 
rather than a permanent structure, is deplorable. By 
setting forth a hypothesis that may turn out to be only 
half true, by formulating a thesis that requires indefinite 
modification, we may serve the cause of history far 
better than by refusing to put anything on paper that 
is not absolutely certain, complete, and undeniable. 
It is only the shallowest fool among critics who contemns 
the pioneer in any line of research for not having 
achieved absolute accuracy. Columbus when discover- 
ing America wrongly believed that he had reached the 
Indies: is his service to geography to be ignored or 
derided because his discovery was made while pursuing 
a hypothesis that was partly false ? The world greatly 
needs Columbuses ; it has no such pressing need for the 
critic, incapable of forming a bold hypothesis himself, 
who exists only to point out ex post facto small errors 
in the work of those who have gone before him. Yet 
I would be far from denying that the critic has his uses 
too; it is certainly far better to have set right even a 
dozen minute mistakes in other men's books than to have 
remained altogether dumb. If one cannot be the pioneer, 
one can at least do unostentatious work as the navvy who 
makes smooth the path which the pioneer has discovered. 



30 INAUGURAL LECTURE 

It matters little what the particular Hne may be that 
we take up, so long as we take up some line. There 
are many before me to-day, admirably competent to set 
to work to build up some particular corner in the vast 
gap of unwritten history that shames us all. Work while 
you may, and where you may. Why have we no real 
history of mediaeval Scotland— why is there in English 
no standard general history of Holland, of Hungary, 
of Norway, of Portugal, even of modern Germany? 
Why are there still important English Chronicles that 
have not been reprinted since the early eighteenth 
century, and others that have not been printed at all ? 
Is it not maddening to think of the vast unsorted bulk 
of local records and documents? There is work for 
the man who can summarize and digest existing 
material, no less than for the man who is intent on 
making fresh discoveries. Indeed the former is perhaps 
the more needed of the two at the present moment. 
Many may urge want of leisure — but surely if there is 
not leisure for a great there is leisure for a small piece 
of work. If we cannot write a large book we may write 
a little one : if even a little book is too much to ask, 
is there not some small piece of editing or commentary 
that would have its worth ? It may be an unremunera- 
tive piece of work, it may be an obscure piece of work, 
it may even be an uninteresting piece of work, that is 
incumbent on the individual ; but surely every trained 
specialist owes ' his stone to the cairn '. We have the 
largest, and as we boast, the best school of history in 
the realm : must we not each do our best to make it as 
productive as it is popular, and as solid in its practical 
results as it is philosophic in its structure ? 



OXFORD 

PRINTED AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 

BY HORACE HART, M.A. 
PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY 



MAY 



1906 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




018 485 069 2 



